When you click on the “Journal” facet after doing a search, it almost always displays about 20 journal titles. However, in a search with thousands of results, you are obviously retrieving many more journals than that. And it doesn’t look like it’s the top 20 journals, either, because some of the hits for the same title are quite low. So what’s going on?

Most facets are created dynamically from search results. The 200 top-ranked records in a search result are used to create the list of facet values which will display in the “Expand My Results” section. All hits in the search results for those values are counted and the number is displayed in parentheses to the right of the facet value. So, really, it is not the 20 most common journals in the result, it is (at least in theory) the 20 most relevant journals.

Furthermore, the “Journal” facet includes newspaper titles, too, since it’s really a category consisting of serials. The resource type “Newspaper Articles,” on the other hand, refers to just articles within newspapers and “Articles” refers to articles in journals and other periodicals. Material types depend on the way the content is cataloged, whether it is by local catalogers (in the CUNY Catalog and CUNY Academic Works) or by the vendor (in the Primo Central Index).